Should Nathan Drake, the hero of the Uncharted games, feel guilty for the people he has killed – and how would that guilt manifest itself as a game mechanic?
Photograph: Sony

Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say! One; two: why, then

‘tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and

afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our

pow’r to accompt? Yet who would have thought the old man to

have had so much blood in him?”

Lady Macbeth was a gamer. She saw in the feudal chaos of Glamis and its environs a chance to play the system and win. Her mission objective was to eliminate King Duncan and take his power, and with her husband she succeeded. But this game of thrones hid from her a terrible mechanic. Guilt.

Remorse is something we rarely experience in video games. For the last 20 years designers have toyed with the idea of culpability and consequence, of getting players to consider their actions in moral terms. Fallout 3 had its karma system, which rated player actions as good or evil, affecting their reputations with any non-player characters they met. Bioshock famously provided us with a choice of whether to harvest or rescue the little sisters. And Mass Effect judged actions on a dual system which shaped lead character Commander Shepard as a “Paragon” or a “Renegade”. These systems are all flawed of course – morality is not a binary paradigm – but they at least attempted to frame player actions in a way that wasn’t purely systematic.

However, asking a player to feel guilt, and recognising the consequences of that guilt in gameplay form, is much more rare. Action adventure games tend to be linear, both in environmental and narrative terms: they point forwards. Mechanically speaking, guilt is essentially retroactive morality. How can that work in a video game challenge system?

This is potentially a big problem for designers hoping to create narrative experiences of true depth and meaning. Guilt is, after all, a defining human trait. For some of us, it is a sort of residual, a background hum. Guilt is emotional tinnitus. Whenever I’m idle for a few minutes, I have this Microsoft Paperclip-style voice in my head: “I see you are trying to relax; can I present you with some of the dumb shit you’ve done today?” And then I think about not kissing my kids goodbye that morning because I was angry with them, or that hour I spent trying to land a helicopter on the top of a moving truck in Grand Theft Auto V when I should have been writing something. Or I think of people I’ve hurt, or not been in contact with, or have let down. It spirals outwards and forever. A universe of guilt, lit by vast supernovas of self-recrimination. That’s normal right?

I can remember a handful of times I’ve felt truly guilty in games, and it has been extremely powerful. In the psychological horror adventure Heavy Rain lead character Ethan is given a series of tasks by the unknown murderer who has kidnapped his son. One of them is to kill a lowlife drug dealer, but just as the player is set to pull the trigger, the dealer reveals that he has children, that he’s desperate, that he’s human. What do you do? I shot him, but felt bad about it – and my guilt was unconnected to the in-game ramifications.

There are very similar moments in Telltale’s excellent Walking Dead adventures, where the player is often required to choose between two characters to save, or even to sacrifice certain people for the greater good. Moral and social consequence are also built into the conversation system, with the ominous textual warning that a character will remember something you’ve said to them. Those warnings would often haunt me through the rest of the chapter – just like the way that in real life, I tend to constantly replay conversations and events, looking for a better way I could have handled things.

What’s really interesting about this is that players complain about how moral systems in games are too systematic. In games with morality gauges, like Fallout and the Fable series, players often find themselves thinking not “what is the morally correct thing to do in this situation?” but “what does the game require me to do in order to ‘win’?”. This is often seen as a failure of game mechanics: it’s not a true moral conundrum if there’s a victory state dependent on our choice. But then, is this really a failure? There’s a whole branch of moral philosophy, deontology, which considers how much our ethical systems are based on external sociocultural rules and duty. Do we avoid doing bad things because we’re inherently moral, or because we have laws? What’s the true imperative behind moral behaviour? Perhaps morality is just a rule system.

Which is why guilt is so fascinating as a game component – it can exist both inside and outside of the mechanics, and it can permeate the whole experience. In the sci-fi strategy game XCOM, players can name the characters themselves, and many of us choose to use the names of friends and relatives. Almost by accident, this brings to the game an almost unconscious guilt mechanic – you feel bad about endangering the character named after your boyfriend, or pet dog, or mum; maybe you even protect that character, placing them at the back of the pack. And when you make a stupid mistake, or overlook a threat, and they’re killed, you feel a twinge of remorse that is greater than if the character had just been named, say, Dr Dirk Danger (apologies if this is, indeed, the name of your boyfriend).

Guilt can add a framework to narrative and action. Macbeth is the obvious example of a story in which guilt is the driving force, and games could certainly learn from it. There’s the common joke about Uncharted – that Nathan Drake is presented in the cut-scenes as a loveable rogue, and yet during action sequences he’s effectively a sadistic serial killer. Even Joel in The Last of Us, a character racked with guilt from a narrative standpoint, is still a remorseless killer when the player takes over. That is of course, an efficient system. Gamers don’t really want a character who breaks down crying during a tense fighting sequence. But then, if we’re going to produce truthful narratives, that sort of thing should probably happen. And it would be sort of fascinating.

One game that really does guilt well is This War of Mine, 11 Bit Studio’s gruelling strategy sim which gives players control over a group of civilian survivors in a war-torn city. There are moments where certain characters under your control will get the chance to steal from or even murder other people to get hold of vital supplies. However, that character may then become depressed and despondent, refusing to leave the shelter, refusing to answer to the player’s mouse clicks. Suddenly we’re in a moral universe where the player must consider the psychological effect of violence. Suddenly mental health is a system.

Developed by Polish team 11bit Studios, This War of Mine seeks to simulate the civilian experience of war, including moral guilt Photograph: 11bit Studios

Meanwhile, Papers Please, a game that puts you in control of a border guard processing immigrants to a repressive regime, is effectively a machine of guilt. Desperate people arrive at your desk, hoping to be allowed entry, and you have to deal with a certain number every day or your family goes hungry. The personal stories of misery and hope these people present you with soon become annoyances to your efficient bureaucracy. Furthermore, the arbitrary rules of entry, which change on a daily basis, render many applications doomed from the start. You just have to turn these people away, their dreams dashed, and you do it quickly to earn more cash. It is incredibly profound. It is about systemised inhumanity. It is about guilt.

It wouldn’t work in all games of course. I can’t really imagine the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder working its way into a Call of Duty title (although Spec Ops: The Line certainly toyed with the concept in a very interesting and provocative way). But as narrative adventures continue to mature, it’s getting harder to reconcile the indefatigability of controllable characters with the resonance that designers want to achieve.

As Lady Macbeth discovered to her cost, terrible actions weigh on us; they have a price and the debt echoes through our lives. Moral decisions are only truly interesting in a game if their consequences keep coming back. If your player character becomes less efficient with a weapon after every kill, if they become withdrawn, or slower, or fail to level up, how does this change how we play? What if the challenge isn’t just about accuracy or speed with a weapon: what if it becomes, “will there be psychological consequences if I use this weapon?”

In a game that married This War of Mine’s remorse mechanic with Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system, we’d have something approaching a moral universe in which individuals matter and lives have meaning – and in which, after the instantaneous pleasure of the action, guilt would stain like blood on the hands.